#wild9

[bogleech]

So this is one of my first website articles written outside my “Halloween season” in years, and one I’ve meant to do for eons. Wild 9 was an interesting little PSX game that had an ENORMOUS amount of story content and a (mostly) richly detailed cast of characters that I absolutely ate up as a kid....but almost entirely through the extensive artwork and lore on the official website.

The creators of this game dreamed very, very big, to the point of sharing their ideas for “story arcs” in a “series” they seemed confident was going to happen, but in the actual game? The only thing they ever actually made? These characters with essay-length, publicly available storylines were sometimes implemented so anticlimactically, I don’t think I can possibly even prepare you for some of them. I don’t want to even give you a hint because it would spoil the surprise how improbably underwhelming some of them are. Luckily, I’ve recovered the original site bios for at least the villains, as well as all the high-resolution concept art that once killed my dialup modem in 1998! The VERY same promotional uploads! You can click most images in the article to see them HUGE!

I’d say it’s a pretty special article to me; I feel like I still think about some of these characters every other week. In 1998, I was 100% ready to be part of a huge fandom that just...never happened.

[importantbusinessdinosaur]

Warmup - Wild 9.

I’m drawing PS1 games all month. Give me a shout if there’s one you want to see, who knows maybe I’ll draw it.

ko-fi | commissions open| Patreon

[bogleech]

A week or so ago I brought up the subject of Shiny's Wild9 and how I was looking for good art of the hero characters; finally found these ancient scans on some archived news site. I'll have to crop them out and it won't look good but it'll be good enough for an article.

Basically this game has INTENSIVE world building and a broad, varied, bizarre cast of characters each with an epic and painstakingly detailed personality and backstory....absolutely none of which was incorporated into the game itself.

Not a terrible game, but the disparity between the final product and its amount of background story is almost unreal.

Like, look at this guy, this rusty robot with a sexy man-head. He had an essay-length character bio before the game came out, telling us all about his life and his hardships and his personality, which was basically like Space Dandy’s and if he came out today he’d probably be everyone’s Stupid Sexy Robot Trash Son or whatever.

In the final game?

Sit down for this

He’s a lever.

He’s literally a lever.

He shows up, he morphs into a replacement for a missing lever, you pull him to open a door and he leaves.

It’s hilarious, but it wasn’t meant to be. They didn’t intend anticlimactic buildup for laughs, they JUST straight-up didn’t have the time or room to do anything with any of their characters.

Roles for our other main characters also included a platform across a lake, breaking down one other door one time, giving you one gun, not actually showing up at all, eliminating some inconvenient crates, being a terrible burden for one whole stage, and in the case of the most important female character, being held in the fist of the final boss ala King Kong, and this was a character we were told had superman-like strength.

And it was still marketed on the hook that it had NINE totally “insaaaane” (this was the 90′s, anything intended to be cool was described as “insane”) outrageous protagonists.